Intel upped their top-end Pentium 4 to 1.8GHz ($562) today along with a 1.6GHz ($294) version. They also released a 900MHz Celeron ($103) and an 850MHz mobile Celeron ($134). Check out our full news item on the subject, and AnandTech has a review of the 1.8GHz Pentium 4 as well. The AnandTech review has some very interesting details, including discussion of the four-layer motherboards and the heat generated by the 1.8GHz P4. They also overclock the chip to 2.0GHz with no problems, making Intel's claim of 2.0GHz Pentium 4 chips in Q3 seem quite likely to happen. The P4, especially when clocked at 2.0GHz, performs quite well against a 1.4GHz Athlon in many standardized benchmarks. It's hard to discount this, as 2.0GHz seems reachable by Intel this quarter and AMD may end the year at only 1.6GHz. Still, it's hard to beat the value of a $130 1.33GHz Athlon. In somewhat related news, The Register put together a release schedule for Intel mobile chips and has 1.5 and 1.6GHz mobile Pentium 4 chips available in February 2002. They will crank up again to 1.7GHz in May 2002.

USER COMMENTS 12 comment(s)

Adding heat to the FIre?(3:35pm EST Mon Jul 02 2001)With these MHZ increases, the P4's seem to be in line to compete and/or beat AMD's 1.4….I don't know, but I think I'd like to see AmD, just start kicking out some new chips…I mean if they had an 1.8mhz chip released, it'd probably be enough to beat an P4 2.2mhz…I don't know, just a though, but I'm just blabbing on…Bottom line, this is almost as interesting as when AMD first hit the Ghz mark….just a though… - by bruthaman

amd…(4:31pm EST Mon Jul 02 2001)clawhammer and sledgehammer should be out in 2k2… The competition will really heat up! - by God™

after you…(7:09pm EST Mon Jul 02 2001)it seemes to me intel waites for AMD to release a chip then they release one a month later around an equal percent .EX. In mid to late march AMD releases 1.33 GHZ Athlon up by 133. Intel followes a month later mid to late april with 1.7 Ghz up by 200. Early June AMD releases 1.4 Ghz up by 66mhz then a month later in early July(today) intel releases newest P4 up by 100mhz. all of those upgrades are close in percentage. coincidense? I dont think so. - by Jason

It's almost as if it's hardly worthy of a comment…(10:44pm EST Mon Jul 02 2001)1.8/1.7 = 1.0588 or 5.9 %

Doesn't sound like an article or benchmark to me. Sounds like a big fat ol' yawn.

Jason has it right: they're going tit4tung in the delta speed increases. Yet, one does have to pause: if you simply add up all the scores of all the benchies (inverting the lower-is-better bunch, and normalizing all so that the mean is “100”), then you see that the Intel 1.8 is about 0.3% faster than a Athlon TBird 1.4

Now that's nuze, isn't it? NOT!!!!!!!

YET IT IS: it just goes to show that Intel's 20 hopper pipeline allows for the faster clock… that sounds good to the consumer, and actually delivers roughly the same performance as the superoptimized competition.

I can envision an article about a year from now: “Today Intel announces its newest speed releases for their Pentium 4 line of microprocessors, the 2.833GHz at $542 and the 2.866GHz at $721. Quantities are limited.”

- by Rick C. Hodgin

Compare what?(1:46am EST Tue Jul 03 2001)I find it sad that people are comparing the P4 1800 to an AMD 1400. Number one, the P4 has 400 extra MHz. That alone will offset the benchmarks by enought hat OF COURSE the P4 is going to win. But think of this. An AMD 1800 (If they could ever push the current core that fast) vs a P4 1800. You would see the AMD win. And when AMD releases the Palmono at those speeds, It will be one hell of a show when the benchmarks come out, and Intel is being blown out of the water. Just my humble oppinion. - by Brad Allen

Brad Allen(11:04am EST Tue Jul 03 2001)

It would seem that way, wouldn't it. However, the Pentium 4 employes a longer pipeline and is capable of doing less per clock. As a result the P4 1800 is probably not yet on par with the AMD 1400, but more likely on par with the AMD 1300.

- by Rick C. Hodgin

I know…(12:01pm EST Tue Jul 03 2001)what's going on. The P4 is a muscle car. It's not optimized, but is designed for shear speed (high clock speeds). Even though it isn't as fast as a lower clocked Athlon, it is designed to be able to scale up to really high Ghz, where the Athlon can't. Then, a 5 Ghz P4 would beat any Athlon.

The hammer series aren't desktop machines, their for servers. At least that's what I've heard.

By the way, just so you know I have an Athlon on my desk. - by amc

Let's just make it really simple…(12:50pm EST Tue Jul 03 2001)[and repetitive of something I've been harping for awhile now]

1800 MHz P4 == 1400 MHz A4

1800 MHz P4's supposedly have been O/C'd to over 2200 MHz in current 0.18 micron technology. 1400 MHz A4's will likely get to 1700 MHz or so.

BOTH will scale in exactly the same proportion when they got to 0.13 – Intel doesn't have any magic bullets that AMD can't employ as well. AMD's tech is going to be 20% MHz slower than Intel's for quite some time, yet the performance will be nearly identical. Give AMD a fatter memory bus (that isn't as latency-impared as SDR/DDR), and it will actually probably beat the P4.

Simple: highly optimized shorter-pipeline designs are simply much faster than long pipe designs… for random-jump logic (which Intel estimates is over 30% of what a chip does). AMC said, “its a muscle car” – – – yep, that's right: the P4 goes in a straight line REAL well. In fact, it is a dragster. But when you need to have great real-world performance, both chips are going to be approximately the same.

- by GoatGuy

So what was the conclusion, Goat?(7:30pm EST Tue Jul 03 2001)

Jeeez. Just read my own comment, and it doesn't say anything conclusive.

Well, try this: “Buy whichever you want, knowing that Intel is a waste of money for 99.9% of what you will employ the chip for on a day-to-day basis. If you need a dragster, get Intel. If you don't have a linear-optimized mission critical app, then stick with AMD, and drop your savings into more memory, better HD, more HD, better video, and maybe a dualhead monitor setup”

Now I feel better. More cans… I gotta chew on more cans. Running low in iron or something.

- by GoatGuy

C'mon, GoatGuy!(3:03pm EST Tue Jul 03 2001)

>Jeeez. Just read my own comment, and it doesn't say anything conclusive.

And….? :) This is nothing new to us.

- by Rick C. Hodgin

The review(12:15am EST Wed Jul 04 2001)First thing that didn't impress me with the review, is that they overclocked the p4 and didn't attempt to do anything to the athlon, then used that as an example of why p4 is going to be the better processor. They also neglect to mention that the way they over clocked the p4 raises memory bandwidth so these test scores don't reflect the performance of the 2ghz p4 that will be coming out. So their conclusion of a 2ghz p4 winning the crown is a bit premature.

Then they throw up content creation and buisness benchmarks. Personally I care more about content creation than how fast my computer can run word, excel, and power point. Usually with those programs the computer is waiting for the user rather than the other way around. I do agree with the superior alu comments but that is provided that the branch prediction unit doesn't miss predict, p4 takes a heavy performance hit from that.

If the inital setup wasn't bad enough, then they throw in a quake3 benchmark. Then state that the pentium4 has done well in games, and only show a quake3 benchmark. Several sites have shown that the reason p4 does well in this, is not because of its superiour processing power, but because of the bandwidth of rdram. The 2ghz p4 does so much better because of its faster fsb again, which has increased the bandwidth. Other gaming benchmarks will show the reverse senario.

Then the funniest part was when they decided to end their real world benchmarks…which only include 640x480x32 tests,(I guess everyone runs at that setting), and turn off the geforce3 optimizations. Stating that it was a bottleneck in the previous benchmark. Dronze is optimized for the p4 a more realistic benchmark would have been to turn off the bumpmapping since there wasn't any bumpmapping in the previous benchmarks.

Overall it seems like incorrect conclusions were made from poor benchmarking, or poor benchmark selection.

I was much more impressed with their dual processor athlon mp review. - by koreberg